not exactly an appropriate thank-you for nearly bleeding out.”
The communicator at the pilot’s chair crackled. The admiral’s voice in question said clearly, “My lord, you’re cleared to leave. We await your word.”
“Loose the clamps,” said the Emperor.
“The clamps are set for release,” said Admiral Sarpedon. Then he cleared his throat and began what you now thought of as the common prayer: “Let the King Undying, ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, look upon the Nine Houses and hear their thanks—” and from behind him joined in the tinny voices of the entire docking crew: “Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him…”
You peered over your shoulder at the porthole. The dimmed interior of Docking Bay Fourteen was lightening: they were opening up some outer airlock, and the shuttle itself was travelling on rails as though to be offered to space like a sacrifice. The velvety blackness of the outside world became naked; cold stars burnt in the distance. The Body came to stand next to you all of a sudden, and you had to school yourself not to reach for the hem of her dirty white shift, the pallid dimpled flesh of her calf. You were leaving, for where you did not know, and you did not know how to feel.
Ianthe kept her eyes downcast, modest and pliant, as though this sickening and poorly acted rôle would convince anyone with a brain. She sat with her rapier belted at her hip beneath her robe, raising bumps beneath the mother-of-pearl cloth, and when you caught her gaze beneath those pallid lashes you could see the hot anticipation in her eyes—one blue, one purple—of someone about to be announced for an award. She was deeply excited. That starry, far-off gaze refocused on you, and she whispered coyly: “Should we hold hands, in girlish solidarity?”
At your expression, she puffed away a strand of colourless hair and remarked, “You’re the one who investigated my tonsils.”
Over the prayer still crackling through the speaker grille, Mercy said, “Releasing in thirty,” and the Emperor, “Don’t triangulate. We don’t want to put them in danger. We’ll hold course until the Erebos is out of our radius.”
He took the lovely rainbow shawl and draped it over the pilot’s chair, and Mercymorn daintily sat down upon it, belting herself in. The Body was gone. Little clusters of bone set over the cockpit window tinkled musically with the displaced air. The Emperor stood behind Mercy, one hand on the chair back, himself a light plex jangle of styluses whenever he moved, and he leant down to press down on the comm button. The prayer stopped as though everyone praying had lost the air from their lungs.
“Our enemies have once more raised their hands to those who would be at peace with them,” he said. “Again, we are a violated covenant, and again we are struck at with anger, and with fear, by those who cannot reason and those who cannot forgive what we are. You who have served on the Erebos—my soldiers and necromancers of the Nine Houses—if you find yourselves on the battlefield, remember that I will make even the dying echo of your heartbeat a sword. I will make the stilled sound on your tongue a roar. I will recall you when you are a ghost in the water, and by that recollection you will be divine. On your death, I will make the very blood in your body arrows and spears.
“Remember that I am the King Undying.”
He lifted his hand off the communicator button, cutting short the primal, triumphant howl that had echoed from the docking crew. You were painfully aware of the lamplights of thalergy signifying the Cohort officers in the dock—ten of them in a cluster a mere forty metres away: too close to be doing anything to aid the shuttle, but praying, maybe. There were more of them, farther away. An orderly line, flushed with blood, pattering with gut flora. They were perhaps working the mechanisms. There were muffled booming sounds as the shuttle clamps were loosed.
The engines behind the blood-daubed wall groaned to life in a huge, dull roar; those thalergy lights fell farther and farther away as you were lowered out the airlock on long struts of plex and steel. Mercy eased a lever upward, nose wrinkling in concentration, and then the thalergy rose away entirely. You dropped through space. The shuttle might as well have been empty for all that you could sense within, except for that single